Real fairytales don't have happy endings.
What if Alvar isn’t as weak as everyone always thought he was?
Stuck in the foster care system for most of his life, Alvar has been passed from one family to the next, never belonging and always a target of bullies. But now, at the age of seventeen, he has learned to mask everything about himself that makes him other and things are finally looking up—that is, until he has a mysterious meltdown in the middle of school.
The only one who seems to know what is going on with Alvar is Ulf—the strange kid in the senior year, who always used to keep to himself but now won’t let Alvar out of his sight. With Ulf, Alvar doesn’t need to mask. He can be completely himself. But at what cost?
Under normal circumstances, the butterflies that appear in Alvar’s stomach when he’s around Ulf would be world-ending in themselves. But circumstances are far from normal: Alvar’s mind is caving in on itself, something is watching him from the shadows and he knows that if he keeps falling apart, his foster parents will change their mind about adopting him—and he’s running out of time. In a year he’ll be a legal adult, homeless and officially on his own.
But what if he isn’t going mad? What if the walls of the world really are crumbling, and the dark things hiding in the shadows really are spilling out? What if there are people pretending to be human who live alongside us that we never knew about? And what if Alvar is one of them?
